The parody/satire defense doesn't work in this case, because a reasonable person familiar with his politics might well believe that Stephen Conroy is currently serving as the Minister for Fascism in Australia's government!

Given his stonewalling of public questions, his inability to answer parliament questions in question time, his personal time spent with the Australian Christian Lobby, and his departments attempt to get the IIA to shut Mark Newton up, I'd say he's well and truly doing that role.

Which policies does the fascist party of Australia advocate regarding network filtering?

"Fascist" is frequently used in this day and age as a pejorative insult to those with whom the speaker disagrees politically. In which ways does this man's viewpoints agree with actual, objective fascist policies? Keep in mind that there is no "right" or "wrong", merely different points of view, all equally valid.

Were I picking terms, I'd use "Orwellian" or "authoritarian" as a better generic pejorative for someone who supports strong government surveillance, control of access to information, and censorship of publication.

This website's owners picked "fascism", perhaps somewhat unfortunately, and I, in order to provide quality Slashdot-comment humor, had to therefore follow them. The main sense in which it's a bad fit is that historical fascism was a combination of authoritarian control over public culture with a mo

Were I picking terms, I'd use "Orwellian" or "authoritarian" as a better generic pejorative for someone who supports strong government surveillance, control of access to information, and censorship of publication.
This website's owners picked "fascism", perhaps somewhat unfortunately, and I, in order to provide quality Slashdot-comment humor, had to therefore follow them. The main sense in which it's a bad fit is that historical fascism was a combination of authoritarian control over public culture with a

He's not actually alone, it's just when ignorance becomes popular, it's the new fact. If 3 billion people start calling cats dogs, then they are now 'dogs'. Words are arbitrary in that aspect.

Words however are for communication of thoughts, and if we are able to abuse words' meanings on whim, it ratherly defeats the point of language. Personally when I think of Fascism, I think of the trains running on time:P

It is amusing though to note how people defend their changes to language as 'growth', whi

In 1944 George Orwell wrote: "It would seem that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox hunting, bullfighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else."

Benito Mussolini used to say that facism should be called corporatism because it's a merger of state and corporations. Franklin D. Roosevelt also had in interesting observation in one of his speeches: "The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling pr

This is the entire point and you hit the nail right on its head. The problem in Australia?... Conroy is one step ahead in the wrong direction... pushed by LARGE corps AND the Christian lobby, of which sucker Rudd is the leader (he just misses out on the small beard under his nose).And yes, Conroy is a mean/nasty piece of work.And I am NOT proud to be Australian.

In general terms, right wingers would prefer communist over fascist because they think fascist is a slur on the right in general, and leftists are the reverse.

However, in a very real sense, communists actually pretended to have high moral principles of power to the people. Of course this was all theory and no practice, but at least they could make that fuzzy claim.

Fascists never had this. Their closest theoretical principle was power to the nation as controlled by its rulers.

On a more serious note, I mean it when I say "good for them." I do admit that it's a little weird for a parody/criticism website of a person to use a URL that is not obviously parody/criticism. But I tend to err on the side of the little gu

AuDA is the epitome of an organization that is operating outside its moral guidelines.

Governments and government departments around the world have no concept of morals, so don't expect anything like that from them. Money talks! You can just sit there and be a good person and pay the taxes they take from you for their bent pet projects and backhanders.

if you dont have a abn dont bother trying to get an.au domain unless you want a id.au domain also it costs almost 4 times the cost of a.com domain

ACN or BRN, actually. Some people can't get a.com.au but can get an ABN. (Sole traders?) Maybe the rules have changed since I last looked. Personally, I want Elz back. He had rules and they were followed. Naturally, he had to go.

*I* know;-)AuDA would need to remove many more websites than the Conroy parody if it would stand to the ruling that the removal was entirely due to "you do not have the right to own the domain because you business does not have anything to do with Conroy". There are so many cases of domain NAMES owned by companies in Oz that have absolutely NOTHING in common with the business.AuDA and Conroy belong in the same pot.

Kevin Rudd isn't sitting up in The Lodge scanning the opinions of contributors to this site. OTH he is surely paying close attention to public opinion and the opinions of certain members of parliament who hold the balance of power.

I think it is important to avoid giving Rudd and Conroy ammunition at this point. Do not behave like a bunch of idiots. Public opinion is fragile. I am reminded of the pilots dispute of almost 20 years ago. The Government swung public opinion their way early on and the pilots never had a chance.

I think it is important to avoid giving Rudd and Conroy ammunition at this point.

Ultimately what we want is to give Rudd one bullet and tell him to use it on Conroy.

You're right in the fact that Rudd is running a very populist government but he cant do a backflip on this policy just yet as he will piss off too many other people. It is an election year and given the disarray the Liberal party are in it's a fairly safe bet Rudd will be re-elected so long as he doesn't screw it up. Elections are the perf

Old story. Back in the days when dumb computer terminals were a new idea a museum had one set up so that people could play with it. Typing words, etc. Of course school groups would come through and it would get covered with rude words so some bright spark wrote a program to filter out the rude words.

Everybody was happy until a bright young geek in a school group saw the flaw in the system. The filtering program had to have a management interface with a way to display the banned list. If that interface could

The domain name is stephen-conroy.com. I'd say, that's trademark infringement. Like, you could own stephen-conroy-sucks.com, but, having a site that has the capacity to mislead people in order to get hits is as wrong as calling something Cheerios when it is not.The irony here is that they basically are saying that someone is a fascist in order to protect their right to lie. I wonder if, really, the rest of the their message is actually honest.

It's your name. The problem here is that the runners of the site know full well that they could put up signs saying stephen-conroy.com in public, and people would go and click on them and get this political message. It's a put on. But really, what's at stake here is that they are arguing for a right to lie, and they shouldn't have it.

It's only a lie if they're claiming to be something they're not. I don't think it follows that a domain name which is someone's name is therefore a site created by that person and/or speaks for that person. Given that names->people aren't 1:1, I think it takes a particularly non-logical step to assume that's true.

There's nothing stopping me creating "bob-smith.com" and putting a page there which says "I think people called bob smith are stupid". Nor should there be.

And on your last point, I believe every individual should have the right to lie whenever they want.

A sight that says "I think people called bob smith are stupid" immediately makes clear to your visitors that you are not Bob Smith sending out your political message, your someone who thinks he's stupid.

This site however looks very professional and uses pictures of Stephen Conroy in such a way as to appear to be affiliated with him. Not until reading the text under the picture of him speaking does the mental dissonance make you realize that this is a parody site, assuming you are interested to read that fa

1. The owners of stephenconroy.com.au have a registered business name in Australia called Stephenconroy. Therefore they're allowed to register the.com.au site.2. I sincerely doubt there's any trademark infringement. Have you got a registered trademark for your name?3. The Minister Stephen Conroy is a person so isn't entitled to a.com.au domain (com means commercial).4. Stephen Conroy could make use of plenty of other sites, e.g. his political party's site or something in the more offici

As an Australian protesting against the proposed filter I find the activities of stephen-conroy.com frustrating. There are strict rules on the registration of.au domains. This has always been the case -- they may look draconian to outsiders used to the standard.com.org etc. TLDs, but that's how it is for us. And it's not such a bad thing. We can be more sure upfront that a.com.au site is actually an Australian business.

It's tempting to look upon auDA shutting down their registration as censorship. But it's not. They registered a domain which has nothing to do with a business. Then in a display of immaturity they have registered the precise business name STEPHENCONROY in Victoria so that they can legally register the domain. This is not helping our cause at all... it's just showing protesters against the filter to be against the spirit of well-meant laws.

Frustrating Government offices with stupid behaviour is not going to stop this filter. Making the general voting public aware of it and concerned about it might. May luck be with us in that endeavour.

Actually, if I'm not mistaken, the business name was granted to them before auDA took their domain away.

It appears that they always did have a valid reason to have that domain and auDA's actions were taken hastily and in a manner that could have denied them the domain. The fact that they did not clearly state their valid reasons is in fact a very good argument AGAINST hasty action. Had auDA acted in a fair and reasonable manner the dispute could have been dealt with and resolved without needing all this h

Mod parent up. AuDA are in fact a bunch of retards for many reasons, but this is not one of them. Simply, the domain as registered did not originally meet the criteria for a.com.au domain (a valid, registered Australian business).

Didn't know they got around this by actually registering a business called STEPHENCONROY. That is pretty funny:)

The "strict rules" are a bunch of baloney when you can spend fifty bucks or something to register a vaguely related business name for no particular reason, and thereby hold the domain. They might as well just give up on the rules and make it a free for all.

I might add that I had problems with auDA ages ago because they wouldn't let me register the exact name of my company, which I had owned from well before the internet was popular, just because my company name was considered "generic" or some crap. I appea

The real issue here is that the domain administrator chose to give us less than three hours to explain our eligibility for the site before closing it down. This is contrary to their published policy as well as other documented instances of this arbitration process, which all seem to indicate that generally ~ 1 week is provided for the respondent to make representations regarding their eligibility. We became aware of another policy complaint lodged with auDA on 21-12-2009 where they responded to the complainant stating that their investigation would take up to 30 days. To this date we are still unaware of any reply form auDA regarding this, which seems to indicate a direct contrast between the way this and our complaint was handled. We specifically asked auDA about how this complaint was different a number of times and these questions were all flatly ignored in return correspondence.

Further to this, auDA flatly refused to rationally consider to any statements regarding our eligibility following the initial three hour period. This seems to indicate that the 14 day 'pending-delete' period the domain was placed in is superfluous, as all arguments following the initial 3 hour period were ignored. Again, we questioned this, as well as the extremely short 3 hour takedown window, a number of times and again all questions were flatly ignored in return correspondence.

Your comment regarding laws seems a little ill-conceived: there are no 'laws' regarding domain registration criteria in Australia - this is handled solely by auDA as an independent body with absolutely no regulatory oversight whatsoever. They make the rules, enforce them how they see fit, and are accountable to nobody. As is quoted on our website:

"This incident reflects worrying concerns about the power that private domain name regulators have to silence critical political speech without going through legitimate legal channels." -- EFA

If nothing else this whole scenario (which, as we're been repeatedly saying, is ultimately a red-herring in the whole censorship debate/movement) has brought international attention to the Anti-Censorship cause. At times we've been taking tens of thousands of hits per day from all over the world, many of which it's rational to assume are from people who were previously unaware of the fight going on here. Love us or hate us, we want exactly the same thing as everyone else -- to see this whole filthy thing dropped. Our methods may have been to date somewhat more guerilla than others, but we're getting the word our en masse.

OK, cool; perhaps you can answer the obvious question. Why did you want stephenconroy.com.au and not, for example, stephenconroy.org.au? Since you are not in fact a business, the latter (or some variant thereof) would have been the more correct choice.

I always wondered why your lawyers never put the point up "but then AuDA needs to take more domains/websites offline as there are so many websites that claim they have got something to do with the domain name but when you look closer they have not. I get frustrated when Google searches return results that have got nothing to do with what I am searching for and is biased by "incorrect" domain names.

Indeed, I will concede that the 3 hours in which to present your case was rather harsh. Nobody should be expected to pull together their information in so short a time, valid use of the domain or not. All the same, I don't think stephenconroy.com.au deserved more than, say, 24 hours, as their site was obviously not intended for commercial purposes. Common sense, please!

And indeed clearly others who have commented have had bad experiences with auDA which I haven't had to face. All the same, the website was o

Oh for Mod points. Arctanx is right. There are at least three quite separate issues here:

a) Stephen Conroy's policies are woefully misguided. They will have the opposite effect on child protection to that publicly claimed, causing an increase the pain and suffering of many children.
b) Even so, registering this protest site is not a good response. Have the site, but put it in stephenconroysucks.com.au.
- I much prefer Australia's rather stricter D

You are wrong around the registration requirements for.com.au domain names. Simply selling advertising relating to the domain name is enough to show a 'close a substantial connection' and qualify and the stephenconroy.com.au. name could easily meet these requirements. Things have changed since the auDA took over, and the auDA has allowed the.com.au domain name space to become full of parked monetised websites.